Author profile
Nick Medina: Books in Order, Biography, and Reviews
Nick Medina was born in Chicago and is a member of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana. He writes horror and suspense about people who have inherited stories they may need to take more seriously than they expected.
Biography and criticism
From Takoda to Torchlight Lake
Medina's first three novels return to a fictional Louisiana reservation. His fourth, Savage Lake, moves north to a cabin where a mother and son see the same place very differently.
Are Nick Medina's books connected?
Sisters of the Lost Nation introduces the fictional Takoda Reservation through Anna Horn and her search for her sister. Indian Burial Ground returns to Takoda with Noemi Broussard and her uncle Louie. It looks back to the 1980s as the two try to understand what happened to someone they knew. The Whistler follows Henry Hotard, a ghost hunter who comes home to Takoda after a serious injury.
The first three books share a setting, and Medina has talked about bringing characters back and following up on threads from the earlier novels in The Whistler. Publication order gives those connections more context. Each book introduces its own central problem, so the order is optional. Medina has explained that the fictional Takoda draw on several influences. His own tribe, the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, is a distinct, real community.
Savage Lake and where to start
Savage Lake is the newest novel and an independent starting point. It takes place at Torchlight Lake, where Nell and her son Oscar try to ready a family cabin for sale. Oscar knows the signs of trouble from horror movies. Nell has reasons to be uneasy that go back to her own teenage years. The narrow setting makes it a different sort of book from the three that spend time with a whole community on Takoda.
Start with Sisters of the Lost Nation if you want to meet Takoda as Medina first introduced it. Indian Burial Ground gives more room to the past of one family. The Whistler puts an old warning at the center of a more direct haunting. All four novels are listed below in publication order.
Books on this site
Nick Medina books in publication order
20234 / 5
Sisters of the Lost Nation
Medina's debut follows Anna Horn through a Louisiana reservation in the middle of a building boom. Its missing-person mystery grows out of the stories adults tell her and the stories they would rather leave alone.
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20243.5 / 5
Indian Burial Ground
Medina returns to Takoda and gives two members of a family their own accounts of grief. Noemi's questions about Roddy's death bring her uncle's memories of 1986 back into the present.
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20253.5 / 5
The Whistler
A young man who made videos about ghosts comes back to Takoda after a serious injury. The book pairs his haunting with a story about the Cadow house and carries forward threads from Medina's first two novels.
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20264 / 5
Savage Lake
Medina's fourth novel leaves the Takoda setting for Torchlight Lake. A mother who remembers the place and a son who knows it mainly through the logic of horror films see different kinds of danger in the same cabin.
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